Tag: infrastructure

Ukraine Energy Sector in Permanent Crisis Due to Relentless Russian Strikes – Daily Power Cuts Affecting All Regions

‘Hello, darkness, my old friend’.

Ukraine’s energy sector is living under extreme circumstances, as the constant Russian drone and missile attacks wreak havoc in the country’s power generation and transmission.

The biggest private energy provider is living in permanent crisis, according to its chief executive.

BBC reported:

“Most of Ukraine is suffering from lengthy power cuts as temperatures drop and Maxim Timchenko, whose company DTEK provides power for 5.6 million Ukrainians, says the intensity of strikes has been so frequent ‘we just don’t have time to recover’.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Tuesday that Russia knew the winter cold could become one of its most dangerous weapons.”

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Ukrainians Attack Druzhba Oil Pipeline Again, Threatening Energy Supplies to Hungary and Slovakia

The pipeline war is ongoing.

On Monday (1), Ukrainian forces hit the Druzhba (‘Friendship’) oil pipeline in Russia’s central Tambov region, according to Kiev’s military intelligence source.

Reuters reported:

“It was the fifth Ukrainian attack on the pipeline which supplies Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia, according to Reuters calculations.

Hungary and Slovakia continue to buy energy supplies from Russia, even after other European Union nations cut ties following its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.”

Officials in Slovakia and Hungary said that oil supplies through Druzhba were running normally.

“Ukraine attacked the pipeline once in March, twice in August and once in September this year.”

Hungary’s Foreign Affairs and Trade Minister Peter Szijjarto said that the attack against the Druzhba oil pipeline inflicted ‘insignificant damage’.

TASS reported:

“[Russian officials] informed Szijjarto in detail ‘about attacks against the Druzhba oil pipeline’, the minister said at a brief press conference streamed by M1 television. ‘Attacks inflicted just minor damage to the oil pipeline owing to actions of the Russian defense’, Szijjarto said.”

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Explosion Rocks Part Of Russia’s Strategic Druzhba Pipeline – All Caught On Camera

While Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, are in Moscow working to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, a series of attacks on Russia-linked oil tankers unfolded both before and during their visit. Now, reports are also emerging of an explosion along the Druzhba oil pipeline.

On Wednesday morning, Kyiv Post cited sources in Ukraine’s Military Intelligence (HUR) that reported an explosion struck the Druzhba (“Friendship”) oil pipeline – one of Europe’s most important energy arteries, which moves roughly 1.2 to 1.5 million barrels per day from Russia through Belarus and Ukraine into Central Europe.

Kyiv Post said an incendiary explosive device detonated on the pipeline near Kazynskiye Vyselki along the Taganrog-Lipetsk segment. The outlet cited residents who heard the powerful blast.

Per the outlet:

The source said the strike took place near Kazynskiye Vyselki, along the Taganrog-Lipetsk section of the pipeline. A HUR official familiar with the operation said the blast was triggered by a remotely detonated explosive fitted with incendiary compounds to intensify the fire.

Footage of the incident has emerged on X…

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“It’s Utilities Versus Rent” – Data Centers Send Energy Prices Soaring

The surge in data center construction to power today’s AI and cloud computing demands has sent electricity prices skyrocketing over the last few years. And, as Bloomberg reports, it is only getting worse.

With electricity costs now as much as 267% higher compared to five years ago in some parts of the US, fingers are being pointed directly at data center activity for blame. And while some – especially generously funded lobbies – are eager to dissemble and distort, claiming that on the contrary, electricity prices are barely keeping up with inflation and that data centers have little to no impact on electrical bills, the map below shows that more than 70% of the nodes that recorded pricing increases are located within 50 miles of significant data center activity.

Take Nicole Pasture: the Baltimore resident said her utility bills are up 50% over the past year. She is also a judge who rules on rental disputes in the city’s district court and sees people struggling with their power bills.

“It’s utilities versus rent,” she said. “They want to stay in their home, but they also want to keep their lights on.”

New data center construction projects are announced weekly, sometimes every day. Some of the construction timelines have upwards of 100 MW of new data center demand being built only two years from groundbreaking. This has to be contrasted against the rate of new energy generation construction, with the recent vite among PJM Interconnection stakeholders resulting in a failure to even select a plan for how to add data centers to the grid. 

“The voting reflects the nearly impossible challenge of trying to ensure resource adequacy and control ratepayer costs, while also allowing data center development in a market that is already short on generation supply and faces a 5-to-7 year timeline to bring on new large-scale generating resources,” Jon Gordon, a director at Advanced Energy United, a clean energy trade group, said in a bulletin on the meeting.

While some utilities have been able to pass the burden of higher electricity costs onto the owners of the large loads, most of the costs of expanding grid capacity inevitably find their way to consumers.

According to Bloomberg, in northern Virginia, Dominion Energy cited data center demand, inflation and higher fuel costs when asking regulators to raise its customer bills by about $20 a month for the average residential user over the next two years. Dominion also forecasts peak demand would rise by more than 75% by 2039 with data centers. It would be just 10% without.

And it’s only getting worse: with hundreds of gigawatts of future power demand from data centers built by companies like Oracle and Microsoft, Goldman writes that “eight out of the 13 US regional power markets are already at or below critical spare capacity levels.”

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Report: U.S. Is the World’s Largest Debtor to China — Thanks to Amazon, Disney, and Tesla

A report published on Tuesday by the AidData research lab at William & Mary university in Williamsburg, Virginia, found that the United States is the largest recipient of loans from China.

The report, entitled Chasing China: Learning to Play by Beijing’s Global Lending Rules, found that 1,193 Chinese banks, investment companies, and government institutions loaned $2.2 trillion to recipients in 179 countries between 2000 and 2023.

AidData researchers drew two surprising conclusions from their research: “China’s overseas lending portfolio is vastly larger than previously understood,” and its loans to the developed world are an order of magnitude larger than widely believed.

The common image of Chinese loans is banks pumping huge loans to Third World countries through China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The ostensible purpose of BRI was to help developing countries build vital infrastructure, but the projects are often criticized as unprofitable “debt traps” approved by spendthrift local governments that saddle the borrowing nations with debts to Beijing they can never repay.

Whatever the flaws of BRI might be, AidData determined that only about 20 percent of China’s titanic lending portfolio involves infrastructure projects in developing nations. Meanwhile, the amount China loans to developed nations “skyrocketed from 12% to 76%” between 2000 and 2023. Ten of the top 20 destinations for Chinese loans are “high-income” countries.

“Another major discovery is that Chinese state-owned creditors have bankrolled approximately 10,000 projects and activities in 72 high-income countries to the tune of nearly $1 trillion,” the report said.

“Much of the lending to wealthy countries is focused on critical infrastructure, critical minerals, and the acquisition of high-tech assets like semiconductor companies,” noted AidData’s lead author, Brad Parks.

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Data centers encounter local pushback amid major growth

At least 16 data center projects, worth a combined $64 billion, have been blocked or delayed as local opposition mounts to the developments, according to a new study.

Research collected by Data Center Watch shows that residents and politicians across seven states have stopped or stalled the data center projects.

In Arizona’s West Valley, development company Tract withdrew plans for a $14 billion project after city officials declined to approve required rezoning. Tract eventually announced a similar project in Buckeye, Ariz., where the development is proceeding.

In Peculiar, Mo., and Chesterton, Ind., residents and local officials also blocked data center developments worth billions.

In total, the study found that six data center developments have been fully blocked since May 2024. The backlash has also delayed 10 other data centers, including two from Amazon.

Nine of the documented data center blockages and delays have occurred in Virginia, the world’s unofficial data center capital, according to the research firm.

The study’s authors also found growing bipartisan aversion to the behemoth data center projects: about 55 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of Democrats in districts with large data center projects have taken public positions against the developments, according to the study.

“This cross-party resistance defies expectations and marks a rare area of bipartisan alignment in infrastructure politics,” the authors wrote.

The report also found that data centers were becoming an intensifying issue in local politics. As energy costs soar and affordability takes center stage, it’s likely more candidates and elected officials will take sides on the projects.

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Germany to funnel more cash into Ukraine’s corruption-plagued energy sector

Germany has pledged to provide Ukraine with an additional €40 million in an effort to prop up its power generation during the winter, Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul has said. The announcement comes as Ukraine’s energy industry finds itself mired in a corruption scandal allegedly linked to an ally of leader Vladimir Zelensky.

Speaking on Tuesday, Wadephul said Berlin was “helping Ukrainians survive another winter of war with an additional €40 million ($46 million).” The diplomat noted that this year alone Germany has already spent €9 billion on military aid for Kiev.

A day earlier, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) announced that it was investigating a “high-level criminal organization” which allegedly profited from contracts involving state-owned nuclear energy company Energoatom.

According to the authorities, the ring forced Energoatom officials and contractors to pay kickbacks for state contracts. Formal charges have so far been brought against seven unnamed individuals. The Ukrainian media has claimed that one of the suspects is Timur Mindich, a close associate and former business partner of Zelensky. The businessman allegedly fled Ukraine just hours before his home was raided by NABU agents.

Mindich’s personal and business ties to the Ukrainian leader are understood to date back to when Zelensky was actively involved in the entertainment industry.

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“We May Have To Evacuate Tehran”: Iranian President’s Remarks Stun Amid Water Crisis

Coming off a very ‘hot’ geopolitical summer which saw Israel and the US attack Tehran and the Islamic Republic’s nuclear energy facilities, Iran is now facing yet another immensely threatening crisis amid historic drought: lack of water for the population of 90+ million.

Rainfall has been at record lows, causing reservoirs to be nearly empty, in an already arid Middle East climate. The situation has grown so acute that President Masoud Pezeshkian has warned that if the drought persists for another month, Tehran’s water would have to be rationed. But this appears to be happening currently, as no rain is expected for at least the next ten days.

Already Iranians are being urged to conserve water and only use what’s available for the most pressing needs. Pezeshkian has actually said something stunning and unprecedented on Monday, though some are describing it as obvious hyperbole: 

“If rationing doesn’t work,” Pezeshkian said, “we may have to evacuate Tehran.“

The alarming statement resulted in an avalanche of criticism in Iranian media, also with former Tehran mayor Gholamhossein Karbaschi dismissing the idea as “a joke” and saying that “evacuating Tehran makes no sense at all”.

Some regional analysts and officials report an over 90% decrease in rainfall compared with last year. The NY Times summarizes of how dire the situation is:

Iran’s officials have begun rationing water in the capital, Tehran, amid a drought so severe that the president has warned the capital may need to be evacuated.

The country is facing the worst drought in six decades, and major dams are at critically low levels. Water authorities this week said the main dams feeding Tehran, on which more than 10 million people depend, were at 5 percent capacity.

On Sunday, the spokesman for Iran’s water industry, Isa Bozorgzadeh, told reporters that water pressure would be lowered from midnight until the morning “so that we can both reduce urban leakage and create an opportunity for city reservoirs to refill.”

People have in some cases taken to TikTok and other social media to show that faucets in their homes have stopped producing water for hours at a time.

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Endgame For Germany’s Industrial Power Prices: Green Deal Failure Sparks Subsidy Spiral

On Thursday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz hosted top executives from the German steel industry at a summit in the the Chancellery to discuss solutions to the deepening crisis. Since the peak year of 2018, German steel production has fallen by around 25 percent.

Germany’s economic crisis is accelerating. Sky-high energy costs, relentless competition from China and India, and the EU’s absurd push for “green steel”—a climate-neutral variant no one demands on the world market—are pushing companies either into insolvency or out of the country.

Thursday’s meeting will bring together industry representatives, unions, and policymakers to chart the next steps for a sector facing its most severe turbulence in decades.

This is just the latest in a string of crisis summits orchestrated by the federal government for media effect. Awareness is demonstrated—solutions? Not so much. For Germany’s economy, political “solutions” increasingly mean one standard instrument: more subsidies.

A One-Issue Summit

Aside from the expected push for protective tariffs, the summit can be reduced to a single dispute: the so-called industrial electricity price. While many energy-intensive companies already receive partial relief, it is far from enough to remain internationally competitive.

Industrial electricity prices have hovered around 16–17 ct/kWh for months. German industry still pays up to 70 percent more than U.S. or French competitors, who benefit from nuclear power as their energy base.

This is the cost of the green transition.

And with it come job losses, shrinking value creation, and, for the first time, sharply declining municipal tax revenues.

Unsurprisingly, the federal government is ready to approve this subsidy. We are deep in a spiral of interventionism.

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Trump Admin To Lend “Hundreds Of Billions” To Build Nuclear Power Plants

While the market is finally starting to grapple with the most unpleasant question of who will plug the funding gap needed to build out all the data centers required to make the AI dream a reality, a gap which Morgan Stanley recently calculated would be as large as $2.9 trillion in capex funding needs, of which at least $1 trillion will come in the form of debt (and mostly private debt)…

… there is another, just as critical question: who will fund the energy buildout that powers these data centers? 

Recall, last December Morgan Stanley calculated that the US would need at least 36GW in new power to be brought online by 2028 to energize all the (yet to be built) data centers, a number which one year later is surely far higher. 

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